Women Artists’ Liberation
I recently participated in a workshop for women artists with about thirty other women. It was led by Emily Feinstein, International Liberation Reference Person for Visual Artists. (See also articles on pages 29 and 31.)
On Friday, Indigenous and Global Majority women met for several hours. We were also able to have all our mini-sessions with each other and stay connected during the day-long workshop on Saturday. That made a big difference. Having a full day to focus on being women artists and noticing what a big contradiction [to distress] that was made it clear that we’ve all become used to having way too little support.
It is shocking to me that after thirty-six years in RC, and being an artist always being central to my life, this was the first time I had gotten to be at a workshop for women artists. Artists’ oppression, male domination, and capitalism work together in powerful ways to limit and suppress women’s work as artists, and this has an immense impact on the world.
WHY ART MATTERS
Art making is a basic and universal human activity, a way of expressing our intelligence, our hopes and struggles, our histories and cultural identities, our connections to the earth and each other. It is so powerful that it is one of the first things dictatorships try to suppress and invading armies try to destroy. For example, slaveholders outlawed drumming and dancing by enslaved Africans; the English burned the harps of Ireland; the Spanish burned the Mayan codices (illustrated books with Mayan history and beliefs); the Chilean dictatorship outlawed the charango, an Indigenous musical instrument.
But oppressed people have always found ways to keep using art to insist on their freedom, to insist that they are human when the oppression says they are not. Art is one of the most powerful organizing tools we have. All organizing is about changing the story we have about reality. Art can often reach past the rigid distresses that keep us believing lies, because it touches us on many levels at once. People who would never read an article about a political issue will respond to songs, poetry, and visual art. People who avoid learning about the oppression of other groups can be changed by a personal story told through art.
Art making and artists need to be taken far more seriously and be given far more support. Women artists have a key role to play in women’s liberation and in all liberation work. When we make art, we are acting against every form of oppression we are targeted with. By showing and celebrating our intelligence and creativity, we are taking a “no limits” stand for ourselves, all women, and all people.
ARTISTS' OPPRESSION
Capitalism uses art to support the oppressive society. It treats art as a product to be sold for profit. It tries to control and suppress art making that undermines oppression.
All art that portrays human intelligence undermines the oppressive society, whether or not it speaks directly about liberation. So we’re told that making art is unimportant and selfish and not a serious job. Resources for artists are limited in the United States, and artists are encouraged to compete with each other for every opportunity to make a living. Art by women, Indigenous people, People of the Global Majority, and working-class people is often classified as a “craft” or “folk art” and seen as much less important than “real art” produced by and for elites. Even within our movements, artists are often treated as less important than people who organize marches or make speeches, although our ability to express a shared vision of liberation is often what moves people to take action.
Artists are targeted with “mental health” oppression—told we are unstable, too emotional, and not objective. Some of these same things are said about women, Indigenous people, and People of the Global Majority. When an artist is also female, the pressure to be silent is much stronger, and when you add being Indigenous or a Person of the Global Majority, it’s stronger still. Many years ago, I read a book by science-fiction writer Joanna Russ called How to Suppress Women’s Writing. It listed all the many ways that women writers are invalidated. For me it was useful in resisting internalized sexism around my writing. It’s a great tool for discharge.
MY WOMAN ARTIST STORY
I have always been an artist. When I was five, my mother taught me to read, and I thought the alphabet was magical. I could write the word cat on a piece of paper and send it to someone far away, and they would think about cats! I was fortunate to have parents who supported my brothers and me to make art. My mother was a feminist visual artist and writer, and my father was a scientist who also wrote poetry and stories. I attended a small rural school in Puerto Rico where we were rarely asked to write, so I didn’t experience criticism for speaking my mind or speaking it in my own way.
We moved to the United States in 1967 when I was thirteen. I was again extremely fortunate—I arrived just as the women’s liberation movement was becoming large and powerful. There was an explosion of art making by women who were just learning that their own lives were worthy subjects for art. Women were forming collectives to make posters, starting small presses, and forming musical bands and theater and dance groups. So I got a lot of support from women a few years older than I was to write poetry about what mattered to me and to trust that it would matter to the world.
It was as a young adult that I began to really experience the multiple oppressions of being a women of color artist. In spite of many new small feminist presses, all of the following—publishing as a whole, the business of book reviewing, the judging of contests and giving of awards, the production of poetry festivals, the university departments that invite writers to speak—were controlled by white men. The few women in decision-making positions were also white and didn’t always fight for other women in general or Global Majority women in particular. Small presses and journals that focused on publishing writers of color were controlled by men who favored male writers. Although Latino (male) artists still had to fight racism, they received much more support than Latinas (females).
In 1981 I was a contributor to a book called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color that had a big impact. It was the first full-length book by Global Majority and Indigenous women who were writing about sexism and racism at the same time. It caused me to be taken seriously by universities, which began inviting me and the other women in the book to speak. It was published by a small white feminist press and then reissued by a Global Majority women’s press that was formed by the editors and some of the contributors.
It was because of the women’s liberation movement, the organizing of women of color within it, and the wave of Black women writers who had led the way a few years earlier that I began to have my work published, and it was because of women’s studies courses that it began to be taught.
I was in two long relationships with men, both of whom said they supported my work but who also actively undermined it. One of them would go into my private writing space and “organize it” by throwing out papers I needed. The other secretly applied for grants for himself from the same funders I had applied to for joint grants for us both. I often had to write a few minutes at a time when my daughter was napping because her father wouldn’t treat my writing as being as important as his work and didn’t support me with childcare.
What I realized this weekend was that although I fought hard and well for myself as a woman of color artist, sometimes found sisters with whom to resist, and became a well-known writer (though still badly underpaid), I paid a high price for having to fight so hard to do the work I love. I spent many years exhausted, struggling against discouragement, and making little money, and I am sure that contributed to my health problems. I have written much less than I would have if I hadn’t had to spend so much energy fighting with sexist partners for the time to write and with sexist and racist editors and administrators for a public space in which to be heard. Because I got so used to fighting alone, I haven’t had a writers’ group in years. Because of this workshop, I will be organizing a writing group of Indigenous and Global Majority women.
Maricao, Puerto Rico
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 201, October 2020)